Meet the 18-year-old Nigerian lady who just graduated college and is starting her Ph.D.

Nkechinyere Chidi-Ogbolu is about to start working on her doctorate in biomedical engineering. And she’s just 18 years old. (Photo: Mercy Daniel-Aguebor)

While many students have just graduated from high school, 18-year-old Nigeria native Nkechinyere Chidi-Ogbolu is graduating from Howard University; not your typical teen. Right?

Chidi-Ogbolu just graduated summa cum laude from Howard University with a degree in chemical engineering — making her the youngest person to graduate from Howard this year, and one of the youngest in Howard’s history.

But that’s not all for Chidi-Ogbolu.

She’s now preparing to start a Ph.D. program at the University of California-Davis after the summer ends. She’ll be studying biomedical engineering with a focus on creating and discovering new medicines.

“I’ve always been interested in the medical field,” she told USA TODAY College. “But I want to have a broader scale of impact than in treating patients one-on-one.”

Chidi-Ogbolu said she’s always been the youngest person in her classes. While most students from Nigeria graduate high school at the age of 16, Chidi-Ogbolu finished high school particularly early, at 14, since she skipped 5th grade and attended an accelerated high school.

After high school, she left Nigeria for America and enrolled full-time at Howard University, a historically black university and her first-choice school.